Help me explain to my wife why this diet is crap

[tdn]

@Jahdra

I once lost 22 pounds in 2 weeks. Here’s what you do: become violently ill with something that also gives you a persistent fever and a horrendous cough, so you are hot (burning calories), throwing up (fewer calories), have diarrhea (even fewer calories), and coughing (coughing for hours on end as if you’re going to cough up a lung burns *lots * of calories).

Ah, but did you keep it off?

[ZipperJJ]

Tell your wife to go get a tapeworm instead.

[Lissak]

@D_Odds

My wife wants me to try the General Motors Weight Loss Diet Program. Now, the first thing I pointed out to her is that there is no corroborating evidence that GM ever actually endorsed a shitty diet plan like this. The plan itself is simple, if crap.
Now hopefully none of the Teeming Millions are taken in by this crappy diet (which claims links to GM and John Hopkins in the preamble). Unfortunately, Snopes has yet to take a crack at this so I am asking for your help. Note that I avoided GQ, so don’t feel you have to post GQ worthy answers, although I won’t mind those either.

I love my wife, but sometimes…

This sounds like crap to me, but it’s all over the place so just for curiosity’s sake, I wrote to Snopes.

[Nanoda]

People who believe in ‘diets’ like this aren’t usually the sort to be swayed by reasonable evidence.

OTOH, provided you’ve got a good stock of fruit + veg for days 1,2 3 and 7 (so you aren’t hungry but stuck w/o anything ‘legal’), it doesn’t sounds like that bad of a week to me.

Day 4 is obviously a deal-breaker for the lactose intolerant (and those who don’t think they could stand a whole day with nothing but bananas), but other than that it sounds like it might even be fun. No?

[Danja]

@D_Odds

My wife wants me to try the General Motors Weight Loss Diet Program.

Am I the only one in the thread who noticed that?

The diet looks like total BS with very little protein… If I were you and I went with it, I would expect the wife to come through for me in spades for whatever request I wished upon her.

[D_Odds]

I’m no nutritionist, but days 1 through 3 look very, very low on protein, and high on getting calories from sugar. Still, high volume, low calorie foods do help to fill one up. If one eats 10 pounds of lettuce, one will be full and still only have consumed 100 calories (or whatever it works out to be).

Plus, eating just beef and 6 whole tomatoes doesn’t thrill me. And, why beef? Why not fish or chicken or turkey? Is beef protein any better?

[D_Odds]

@Danja

Am I the only one in the thread who noticed that?

The diet looks like total BS with very little protein… If I were you and I went with it, I would expect the wife to come through for me in spades for whatever request I wished upon her.

I could stand to lose more than a few pounds (and I have slowly been shedding some), but it would have been clearer to state that she wants me to do the diet with her…misery loves company and all that.

I can’t see watching football on Sunday and being limited to plain carrot and celery sticks…and no beer!

[jjimm]

I have seen this diet called the “Mayo Clinic diet”, I think (or was that the cabbage soup one?).

@panache45

…10 glasses of water, which is an insane amount…

Is it? How much is in a glass? To me a glass is about 200 ml. In which case, 2 liters of water seems quite a normal amount - personally I drink about 4 liters of water a day, if not more.

[AskNott]

I am a General Motors retiree. I guarantee that General Motors published nothing resembling this crazy regimen from August 1969 to June 2003. They were concerned about our health (they didn’t want us missing work,) and they gave us a variety of sensible weight loss advice during those years. They always cautioned against crash diets.

If you’d like to see an actual diet plan from the General Motors Life Steps program, I can probably get you one. They’re nearly begging to send me health advice.

[Dangerosa]

@D_Odds

slortar, I’ve tried that tact before, using hard numbers. Of course, when a diet claims faith and hopes for miracle cures trump logic and science.

When that magic food appears that truly has a negative caloric value, I’m going to gorge like a true American!

Very cold water. Your body burns calories bringing it up to body temperature and it has no calories. Course, it isn’t exactly burning calories at the same rate as jogging, nor is exactly calorieless brownies, but I recall that simply drinking your eight glasses of water a day iced on a diet is worth a few pounds over the course of a year.

[IrreverentTone]

@D_Odds

Especially watermelon and a loupe

Ya know, I can see this diet actually working pretty well for me.

Because after I crunch up that loupe on day one, I’ll pretty much just be drinking water for the next week anyway.

[vetbridge]

During the first seven days you must abstain from all alcohol

I’d rather be fat.

[Cat_Whisperer]

I’m personally on the early check-out plan - don’t take too good care of yourself, so you don’t last too long. It’s the last years that are the sucky ones, you know. And if all the global warming stuff is real, who wants to be around in 50 years?

ETA- Oh yeah, the OP. That diet is crap. Part of the beauty of the early check-out plan is that all foods, all the time are encouraged.

[Shirley_Ujest]

@Waverly

GM has a weight loss plan?

I suppose you loose 20% of your total weight the moment you drive off the lot, and weigh next to nothing five years later.

GM trainers cost $78/hour and refuse to train with you two weeks a year unless you give them a raise.

GM’s low carb meal inexplicably ships in from Japan and is cooked in Mexico.

But does it have a warranty?

[Epimetheus]

@Captain Carrot

Losing anything close to 2 pounds a day is dangerous and completely unhealthy.

Losing much more than 2lbs a week is unhealthy.

[lorene]

Not only is the diet itself ridiculous in terms of food choices, but it’s not a good idea to follow a plan that encourages you to stuff yourself full of anything, rather than learning to listen to your body’s satiety cues.

[ForumBot]

I assume she needs to lose a bit of weight, and wants to just rush this quick diet to get to where she’ll like to be, and then the plan is to eat/exercise sensibly to maintain that beautiful new slim figure the “I shit bananas” diet inevitably brings? Why not ask her to cut out the bizarre diet and just eat sensibly now?

A crazy diet like that will test the limits of your self-control (I can back this up with cites, if you really want) and you WILL see it affect the rest of your life in other ways, almost certainly reverting to a cheeto and mashed potatoes diet, causing her to balloon back up to the original weight in no time at all, plus some extra as the body’s precaution against trying anything that stupid again.

Tell her this diet is almost guaranteed to make her fatter than she is now.

http://www.calorie-count.com/calories/article/fad_diet_dangers.html

@OP

Then she said that it starts by removing ‘toxins’ on the fruit day.

@http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18595886/

“Your body does a perfectly good job of getting rid of toxins on its own,” says Dr. Nasir Moloo, a gastroenterologist with Capitol Gastroenterology Consultants Medical Group in Sacramento, Calif. “There’s no evidence that these types of diets are necessary or helpful.”

Also, the diet seems to eliminate potassium and protein for a considerable amount of time, which is very dangerous.

@http://www.buzzle.com/articles/potassium-deficiency-effects-of-low-potassium.html

* Fatigue
* Patient may experience problems such as Myalgia and muscular weakness
* Patient may experience hyponatremia and also may experience confused i.e. anxiety.
* Acme problem
* Skin related problems such as blistering, skin eruptions, dryness of skin etc.
* Temporary memory loss or problems such as weak memory etc.
* Patient is prone to heart related problems, such as heart deterioration.
* Digestive system also may get affected due to potassium deficiency leading to hypertension, improper sleep, nervous system deterioration, depression, constipation etc.
* In some cases patient may experience ringing/noise in ear.

[ForumBot]

@lorene

Not only is the diet itself ridiculous in terms of food choices, but it’s not a good idea to follow a plan that encourages you to stuff yourself full of anything, rather than learning to listen to your body’s satiety cues.

Your stomach isn’t really very good at telling you how much you should eat. You’ve heard of the never-ending soup bowl? Researchers set up participants with two bowls of soup, one of which held nine ounces, the other was rigged to a tube that slowly refilled the soup to make it appear as if only half a bowl had been eaten when really 15 ounces were.

Participants who unwittingly ate the 15 ounces reported feeling just as full as the ones who ate 9 ounces.

[Ghanima]

Wow. I hate bananas and I hate milk. Day 4 would have me vomiting. But what is this “special soup” it mentions? Is that one’s banana milk vomit?

[Arnold_Winkelried]

“weight loss of 10-17 lbs per week” ? Sold! I’ve neve been able to lose weight that fast with those other crappy diets! They had me at the first sentence, I don’t need to read any further. Where do I sign up for the plan? I’ve got my credit card right here in my hand.